Physical Warp Drives

Physical Warp Drives: In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre penned “Hyper-fast Travel within General Relativity,” a scientific paper that inspired the scientific community to take seriously the Star Trek–like possibility of warp travel. Nonetheless, Alcubierre’s conceptualization of warp-drive spacetime (the Alcubierre metric) is “unphysical” (unachievable), as it requires negative energy, which has not been found in nature. Thus, for nearly thirty years, many feared that warp travel would never be possible. But a 2021 study in Classical and Quantum Gravity, titled “Introducing Physical Warp Drives,” renewed interest in warp drives by presenting the first general model for subluminal positive-energy warp drives, receiving press in over 40 nations. The researchers hypothesized that there are many more classes of warp drives beyond Alcubierre’s. In fact, several newly presented warp drives decreased the negative energy requirements of the Alcubierre metric by a factor of 100, making the creation of warp drives closer than ever before. The paper also demonstrated that occupants within a warp-drive spacetime experience time differently from those outside the drive, in contrast to generic warp drives. Finally, the researchers proved that a class of subluminal warp drives (Class I Warp) can be constructed, in principle, based on the physical assumptions known to humanity today.